Not sure if this is a bug or just what's happening, but here's a Galactic M.A.I.L log of an ISS being captured in the Sandbox game. Ironicly, I'm in Fed space the whole time, but my experience is too high for Zyrain to come rescue me. Sometimes once it gets to the point when I start fleeing, I flee twice per attack! Don't know what that's all about, but here goes.

Received from Shipboard Computers at 07:44:25 AM S.D. 10/03/23:
> Chimera destroyed 2000 shield points and 7751 fighters.
Received from Shipboard Computers at 07:44:32 AM S.D. 10/03/23:
> Chimera destroyed 9901 fighters.
Received from Shipboard Computers at 07:44:35 AM S.D. 10/03/23:
> Chimera destroyed 9842 fighters.
Received from Shipboard Computers at 07:44:41 AM S.D. 10/03/23:
> Chimera destroyed 10031 fighters.
Received from Shipboard Computers at 07:48:21 AM S.D. 10/03/23:
> Chimera destroyed 9993 fighters.
> You fled from Chimera to sector 6
Received from Shipboard Computers at 07:48:48 AM S.D. 10/03/23:
> Chimera destroyed 976 fighters.
> You fled from Chimera to sector 1
Received from Shipboard Computers at 07:49:01 AM S.D. 10/03/23:
> Chimera destroyed 1041 fighters.
> You fled from Chimera to sector 4
Received from Shipboard Computers at 07:49:18 AM S.D. 10/03/23:
> Chimera destroyed 155 fighters.
> You fled from Chimera to sector 5
Received from Shipboard Computers at 07:49:27 AM S.D. 10/03/23:
> Chimera destroyed 85 fighters.
> You fled from Chimera to sector 1
Received from Shipboard Computers at 07:49:34 AM S.D. 10/03/23:
> Chimera destroyed 89 fighters.
> You fled from Chimera to sector 2
Received from Shipboard Computers at 07:49:40 AM S.D. 10/03/23:
> Chimera destroyed 109 fighters.
> You fled from Chimera to sector 9
Received from Shipboard Computers at 07:49:52 AM S.D. 10/03/23:
> Chimera destroyed 7 fighters.
> You fled from Chimera to sector 2
Received from Shipboard Computers at 07:50:00 AM S.D. 10/03/23:
> Chimera destroyed 15 fighters.
> You fled from Chimera to sector 10
> You fled from Chimera to sector 2
Received from Shipboard Computers at 07:50:26 AM S.D. 10/03/23:
> Chimera destroyed 3 fighters.
> You fled from Chimera to sector 10
> You fled from Chimera to sector 9
Received from Shipboard Computers at 07:50:50 AM S.D. 10/03/23:
> Chimera destroyed 1 fighters.
> You fled from Chimera to sector 2
Received from Shipboard Computers at 07:50:56 AM S.D. 10/03/23:
> Chimera destroyed 1 fighters.
> Chimera captured your Imperial StarShip in combat!
> For abandoning ship, you lost 154 experience points.
> You fled in your Escape Pod to sector 3

At that point you were probably being attacked with 1 fighter at a time. If you didn't lose any fighters, you fled but you didn't get a message about the combat.

Yeah, Mongoose could be right about that. But the attacks would have to be coming very close together, within a second. So let's keep an eye on this.

Good point, JP. Jaybird, I would ask Chimera if he killed you with a script.

Could also be an alien sitting at Sector 10. They will attack with a small amount rather than just throw everything at you. So if you had a small number of figs, an alien at 10 could immediately attack you when you get there, bouncing you around. I actually did a lot of work on dealing with this situation between v2.07 and v2.08. Aliens could attack immediately, so you could get bounced around to three or four sectors before you'd even get a message. Now they're set to use a ship's standard attack delay, which now that I think of it, if it's running on a current version, would keep the alien from bouncing you immediately. But yeah, there could be another player in sector 10 attacking immediately with a script? Or just a bug. I haven't had a report of this prior to this post.

I set up a little test in 2.10, with one player (Chobots) in a Colonial Transport, attacking another player (Tester) in a Scout with no fighters but plenty of shields. This is what Tester saw upon logging in:



You do not get a message that someone attacked you unless you lose fighters from it.

Just to be sure, I gave Tester some fighters and repeated the test. Same result. No fighters were lost by the player being attacked, so they received no message about being attacked, just the message about fleeing.



Grats, jaybird... I think you found a bug.

Ok, I'm trying to sort this out. I think you get the "Shipboard Computers" message with the timestamp ONLY if you lose fighters, but you get the "you fled" message in either case. That means that the timestamp doesn't indicate that the second flee occurred in the same second. I was misreading that. It could have happened anytime after the first flee, but since you didn't lose figs, you'd only see the "fled" message. I think this is confusing, but expected behavior.

Just to illustrate, in Jaybird's case, you lose figs in one attack, not in the second, then again in the third, and it would look like this:

Received from Shipboard Computers at 07:50:00 AM S.D. 10/03/23:
> Chimera destroyed 15 fighters.
> You fled from Chimera to sector 10 [end attack one]
> You fled from Chimera to sector 2 [end attack two]
Received from Shipboard Computers at 07:50:26 AM S.D. 10/03/23:
> Chimera destroyed 3 fighters.
> You fled from Chimera to sector 10 [end attack three]

While in your example, you never lose any figs, so you never get the Shipboard Computers message with the timestamp. So three attacks would look like this:

> You fled from Chobots to sector 1434 [end attack one]
> You fled from Chobots to sector 2970 [end attack two]
> You fled from Chobots to sector 1542 [end attack three]

The message about arriving far from a port will only appear in certain circumstances.

Right. Isn't this a bug? I would have expected to see

Just looking at the log he posted, it doesn't look like a script to me.
A script would have calculated ship's odds and then attacked with what was needed. When I'm trying to cap a ship by hand, I will eyeball figs and shields and then slow down the attacks once the shields are gone.
In the end I'm hitting with one or two figs at a time.

It's not a bug, Mongoose, though it may be bad design. It just doesn't report if you don't lose any figs. But you still get a report that you fled. As with so many things, it's hard to change something like that without messing with scripts.

Even a script doesn't know how many shields a ship has. But it turns out that the speed of a script is not necessary to reproduce what jaybird saw in the log.

This is off topic, but now I'm curious... when a ship is attacked, is the distribution of damage between its fighters and shields proportional to the number of fighters and shields that it has?

As a script writer, I don't consider messing with scripts a valid reason not to improve the game. There are only a handful of scripts and script writers out there. They can easily adapt. Anyway, it's your game.

I'm also working on writing a lexer for my own helper, and I've examined the open-source lexer that was used in J-TWAT. I doubt any helper's lexer is so strict that a change like this would break it. Most of the game text is eaten and ignored by a catch-all rule, anyway. I haven't examined the lexer for TWX, but I'm sure ElderProphet could tell you about it, and I'd be very surprised if it's not the same.

You might want to be careful about changing or removing text that helpers recognize, but you probably don't need to worry about adding text they don't recognize, whether it's a message for zero fighters destroyed, or the GUID I suggested in another post. In all likelihood, it'll just be ignored by existing helpers and scripts.

All damage is applied to shields first, then to fighters.

I'm just going on experience, any small change can break things, and people can be very vocal about it. It's best to avoid a change unless it's absolutely necessary. If I wanted to clean up the game, there are a ton of things like this that I'd change. One of these days I will fork the game and do that. It would be nice to lock in the current version and continue forward with only those features that I feel are best. That's basically what v4 would do. No more optional features to support gameplay that I think it bad for the game.